Design And Implementation Of Enterprise-level Reporting System

Enterprise Reporting is a hot topic in the industry, and it has great advantages over simple data warehouse and business intelligence tools. Last ten years witness the significant transformation of business models and at the same time the more and more demanding requirements on reporting tools. In the terms of technology view, as it goes into modularization and standardization in the way of software and system designing, and with the booming technology including Web Service, SOAP and Xml, it is harder and harder to detect the difference between software application and enterprise reporting system. As a result, enterprise reporting became more and more popular thanks to the widely developed and distributed software application .And those technologies which could integrate distributed data sources by dealing with meta data would be the best way to fulfill enterprise reporting system. As it goes, to develop an enterprise reporting system as described above Which will vitally improve user experience would be a critical step for those ambitious and promising players in nearly every industry.The paper is based on the design and implementation of an enterprise reporting system called Report Center which deals with fund accounting for a famous financial firm. The paper proposes functionality modules and high level architectural design for the system. And it also presents effective solutions to critical issues including information integration, performance tuning, security and system globalization in Report Center design process.To detail Report Center uses Rational Rose UML tools to design system modules and functionalities. It chooses J2EE as its framework to implementation B/S web structure, and it chooses Actuate iServer as its reporting server to deliver dynamic fund accounting data. It designs a single module called Map2db to integrate all the different data sources in the firm. It implements POJO (Plain Old Java Object)to replace some EJBs in the system to reduce remote calls and thus improve the overall performance. It combines Site Minder, LDAP and Actuate RSSE to implement its security framework which fulfills Authentication, Authorization and Single Sign On. And by developing separate function modules on iServer and coding on report module level based on Unicode standards, it implements Globalization. Through Software Configuration Management tool like Clear Case and Clear Quest, Revision Control and Change control have been effectively realized on each step.